Sanford Schwartz explores the trailblazing career of 19th-century Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks
Edward Hicks (1780–1849) was the creator of one of the most familiar scenes in American art: the Peaceable Kingdom, which depicts a realm where wild and flesh-eating animals come together with defenseless creatures, and will not harm them. Because Hicks was a Quaker minister, his many renderings of the scene have been taken as largely a self-taught artist’s professions of Quaker pacifism.
But here, author and curator Sanford Schwartz, in a wide-ranging study that for the first time looks at Hicks as an imaginative artist as well as a minister, shows how the Peaceable Kingdom paintings—there are some 60 examples, made over 30 years—tell a richer story. In Schwartz’s hands, Hicks emerges as a person and a painter who hardly seems to be of the past. We spend time with this passionate, vehement figure who was also empathic and ardently connected to his wide community. And we see how the Kingdom series, though labeled folk art, share much with the work of mainstream artists of the time and even with work we now call outsider art.
This version of Edward Hicks's "Peaceable Kingdom" (c. 1833' is reproduced from 'On Edward Hicks.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Deborah Solomon
Edward Hicks painted dozens of versions of his "Peaceable Kingdom," and I never thought about one until I read Sanford Schwartz's remarkable new book, On Edward Hicks, a scholarly page-turner that makes 19th-century American art new again.
Brooklyn Rail
Brandt Junceau
On Edward Hicks is a story of everything. Here’s antebellum America itching for a fight with itself, with one public figure hooked between community and conscience, hoarding a few delicious hours alone, for pictures.
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Friday, December 3 at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST, The Brooklyn Rail presents curator and author Sanford Schwartz in conversation with art historian Choghakate Kazarian and artist Brandt Junceau about Schwartz's most recent publication, On Edward Hicks, published by Lucia | Marquand. The live Zoom event will conclude with a poetry reading. Register here! continue to blog
Self-taught artist Horace Pippin's 1945 painting "Holy Mountain III" is reproduced from On Edward Hicks, Sanford Schwartz's illuminating study of the Quaker minister and ornamental sign painter Edward Hicks's most iconic work, "Peaceable Kingdom," and its many permutations. (Hicks painted more than sixty versions of the painting over the course of his lifetime, and it was adapted by many other artists, including Pippin, since the first iteration sometime around 1820.) "Presenting a dream of friendliness and serenity yet often tense and unsettling—and starring, as it were, an almost all-animal cast yet clearly about human experience—Edward Hicks’s many paintings entitled 'Peaceable Kingdom' might be called inside-out masterpieces," Schwartz writes. "In pictures set at the edge of a wood, we see an assembly of wild beasts, including a bear and a wolf, and of tame, or farm, animals, including a kid and a cow. They are living as a group, as the words 'peaceable kingdom' would suggest, in a domain where predators and their prey have come to coexist.
But the scenes, where the animals are often jumbled together, seem as much to show a peace conference that has only just gotten underway after a recent ceasefire. Harmony is less in the air than something unexpectedly realistic and psychological."
continue to blog
Sanford Schwartz explores the trailblazing career of 19th-century Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks
Edward Hicks (1780–1849) was the creator of one of the most familiar scenes in American art: the Peaceable Kingdom, which depicts a realm where wild and flesh-eating animals come together with defenseless creatures, and will not harm them. Because Hicks was a Quaker minister, his many renderings of the scene have been taken as largely a self-taught artist’s professions of Quaker pacifism.
But here, author and curator Sanford Schwartz, in a wide-ranging study that for the first time looks at Hicks as an imaginative artist as well as a minister, shows how the Peaceable Kingdom paintings—there are some 60 examples, made over 30 years—tell a richer story. In Schwartz’s hands, Hicks emerges as a person and a painter who hardly seems to be of the past. We spend time with this passionate, vehement figure who was also empathic and ardently connected to his wide community. And we see how the Kingdom series, though labeled folk art, share much with the work of mainstream artists of the time and even with work we now call outsider art.
